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Dream of Little Star – A Quick Look at Planetarian for iOS

Some big news for visual novel fans over the past few days as the iOS version of Key’s planetarian now includes an English translation. Planetarian is the fourth release by Key coming right after CLANNAD. The story takes place in a post-apocalyptic future where a man known as “the junker” arrives in a dead city. There, he meets a malfunctioning robot in a planetarium on top of a ruined department store.

The story is presented in landscape or portrait mode. Portrait mode cuts off the left and right of the image as opposed to landscape mode. Also, there’s an option between “adventure mode” which is present in traditional visual novel style, and “novel mode” which fills the screen with text and no images. The size of the text can be adjusted by pinching the screen which is quite useful. The app also includes a CG gallery and music gallery as well. Below: Novel Mode, comparison between landscape and portrait mode)

Novel Mode

Portrait

Landscape

I played the PC version back in 2007/2008 and it still made me tear up by the end. If you’re not a fan of Key’s other titles (like CLANNAD or Air), you might want to avoid this title. It’s very similar to their previous works. Out of all the Key’s titles, this one would rank first or second with CLANNAD being the other choice. It’s shorter than the other titles, and more straightforward in its storytelling which I like. The voice acting, particularly Suzuki Keiko’s as Yumemi, is quite good and captures her cheery and talkative nature. The adaptation is well done at scaling for various devices. Priced at $3.99 USD, I feel that this is a reasonable price for what you are getting. I highly recommend picking this up if you have an iOS device, and I hope the sales of this encourages VisualArt/Key to bring their other titles out in English. Currently there is only the Japanese version of the Android app on Google’s Play Store. Though I imagine it would be a matter of time before the English version is made available.